Abstract
The ecology of language aims at the preservation of biodiversity in nature, language and culture which would result into an ecological form of globalization. This task has been undertaken by Manuel Rivas (b. 1957), a contemporary Galician writer who is also an internationally renowned poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist and journalist and writes mainly in a peripheral language. His ecological use of language is better perceived in his representation of “the other,” in his creation of a Galician social imaginary and in his global approach. By means of different postcolonial theories, I have explained and theorized Rivas’s use of Galician tradition in his ecological globalization process. The author is aware of a particular Galician way of thinking and relating to the world (gnosis) that reconciles opposites thus allowing for self-expression while acknowledging official discourse. Throughout centuries of colonialisms, this gnosis has sustained an attitude that is at once a form of resilience and reexistence perceived in what is traditionally called retranca. Rivas captures this Derridean, though constructive, gnosis and uses it, including retranca, as a literary technique to avoid the contamination of language and the fossilization of meanings that impose on us to fixed categories without allowing for plurality. As a result biodiversity is preserved and Galicia recreated in a most contemporary way while, at the same time, an ecological form of globalization
is generated.
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